How to Choose Your Next Book - Farnam Street

Get back to basics. 

Understanding the basics, as boring as it sounds, is one of the key elements of effective thinking. A lot of people assume the basics are not important and never really take the time to learn them, preferring the sexiness of complexity. Understanding a simple idea deeply, however, creates more lasting knowledge and builds a solid foundation for complex ideas later.

Build your foundation. The key here is brutal honesty with yourself about what you really know.

The multidisciplinary mind understands the basic ideas. Acquiring the basic mental models from multiple disciplines allows you to see things that other people can’t.

You don’t need to understand the latest study in biology, but you sure as heck better understand the concept of evolution because it applies to so much more than animals.

Understanding the basics allows us to predict what matters. Put simply, people who understand the basics are better at understanding second and subsequent order consequences.

What has been will continue to be. Something that is not fading away is here to stay.

The nonperishable is anything that does not have organic or avoidable expiration dates.

While produce and humans have a mathematical life expectancy that decreases with each day, some things, like books, increase in life expectancy with each passing day.

The longer something non-perishable has lived, the longer we can expect it to live.

Focus on reading basic ideas that have stood the test of time as a means to understand them better.

Knowledge has a half-life. The most useful knowledge is a broad-based multidisciplinary education of the basics. These ideas are ones that have lasted, and thus will last, for a long time.